The study found that even small steps such as people putting on sunglasses in a bright room will lead many of them to assume their actions cannot be monitored, and they will soon begin taking ethical liberties. The study was widely reported in the media, and the best explanation of how the experiments were organized can be found on the Time Magazine website.

For the authors, darkness can be equated with anonymity, which to me has significant implications for the Internet, where, as the famous New Yorker cartoon once noted, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” As Zhong, professor of organizational behaviour at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and lead author of the study, told the Toronto Star: “Anonymity can license unethical behaviour.”

Unfortunately, anonymity has become standard operating procedure online, best illustrated by the websites that invite reader comment. Few sites insist that visitors clearly identify themselves, and the upshot is that much of what is posted online by way of reader reaction is rubbish.  Take that anonymity away, and the results can be dramatic.

Consider the New York Times approach to reader feedback, which Anthony Williams and I discuss in our upcoming book, MacroWikinomics. Four years ago the Times saw the writing on the wall and appointed Jonathon Landman as deputy managing editor, with the mandate to reinvent the paper around the Internet. Today the Times’ web site is widely regarded as one of the best and most innovative media sites in the world. Landman says he built on two of the Times’ greatest strengths: The top-flight journalism it produces, and equally important, the top-flight readers such journalism attracts. “Our quality proposition is central to who we are,” says Landman.

All reader feedback is identified by the reader’s name and passes through the hands of en editor. The name-calling and ad hominem drivel typical of most newspaper comment pages isn’t tolerated. “We are not shy about moderating things out,” says Landman. “There is no constitutional right to have your comments published. And certainly if it’s abusive or stupid or something, well then, what’s the point, why is that a good thing?” The result is an articulate discussion by readers with the paper and readers with one another.

The high-quality dialogue improves the editorial content. “Editors look at the comments and they then draw conclusions about the kind of editing it may still require. You can tell, for example, that people may not understand something. It’s not clear. So you fix it. Either you may get additional facts or you may get an interpretation challenged and see that you have to adjust it someway. So in a very real sense, readers are participating in the editing even if they don’t know they’re doing it.

“The challenge is to create an environment in which the right kind of people want to participate… Wikipedia has done a miraculous job of preserving standards in a collaborative way, and to me the great accomplishment of Wikipedia is not so much that it gets a lot of people participate. That’s actually relatively easy. It’s that it’s able to enforce clear set of accepted standards and that it’s able to get the community to enforce those standards.”

To be sure, not all anonymity is bad.  Sometimes it allows people to ask questions or make comments that would be awkward or inappropriate if their true identity were known.  But such occasions are relatively rare.

This is why I’m sending kudos to the province of Ontario’s educational television network for thinking outside of the box and programming a new show called Pillars of Freedom, in an effort to not only entertain, but to educate and engage kids. Additional kudos as you don’t have to be from Ontario to enjoy the program – everything is online.

The show’s creators were inspired (by means of being uninspired by low voter turnouts) to create a multi-platform, interactive show that teaches kids at an early age about democracy and the consequences of choices. Kids aged 6-10 watch the show which portrays two young dragons who are trying to restore freedom to their kingdom, which is suffering from apathy. Viewers are driven online to a “choose your own adventure” series of choices.  Within the show’s online community, kids can vote on what they would like to see the animated characters do next, watch previous episodes and play out the roles of the two protagonists via the show’s online game. It is a great example of the kind of programming that a generation which is growing up online is looking for. It’s fun, interactive, educational and puts viewers in the driver’s seat to do what they do best – choose.

I encourage other programmers to start thinking how we can inspire our youngest citizens to want to understand the importance of civic values.

So true.  As reported in the online publication eCampus News, Madan was part of a panel discussion at Social Media Week in New York.  Education technology experts on the panel said keeping college students and their professors connected through social media outlets could be key in boosting graduation rates.  The future of campus technology, Madan said, “is not going to be sitting there and watching a webcast of a professor lecturing on a screen—that’s not engaging.”

Social Media Week ran through the first week of February in six cities worldwide—New York City, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Sao Paulo, and Toronto—and authorities from the business world, academia, and other fields discussed how social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are shaping global culture.

Kathleen King is a professor of adult education at Fordham University. She said that professors are unlikely to accept and use social media tools in their courses widely until faculty members are rewarded for innovative accomplishments—and not just traditional research and pursuing tenure.

“There is no incentive in most universities for engaging with social media or even for faculty to engage their students,” said King, president of Transformation Education LLC, a group of educational advisors based in New Jersey. “We have to start with the professor first, and we have to look to the institution.”

The tools are there.  There are many Facebook applications that can help faculty engage with students, and faculty engage with one another.

And the need is there.  Universities are facing a high dropout rate.  A dismal 58 percent of entering freshmen in the U.S. actually graduate from the same college within six years. More and more students are questioning the “bang for the buck” as college tuition has risen in cost more than any other good or service since 1990, leaving students with $714 billion in outstanding student-loan debt.

At its top levels, the American universities are among the best in the world. Yet in terms of its core mission —producing educated college graduates — much of the system is simply failing.

According the New York Times, only 33 percent of the freshmen who enter the University of Massachusetts, Boston, graduate within six years. Less than 41 percent graduate from the University of Montana, and 44 percent from the University of New Mexico. The economist Mark Schneider refers to colleges with such dropout rates as “failure factories,” and they are the norm.

We need to do much better. Half a billion people now participate in social media sites, reflecting the remarkably compelling nature of online relationships.  Their use in making higher education more engaging is urgent and obvious.

A compilation of four new studies of one-to-one computing projects in K-12 schools has just been published by the Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment, a peer-reviewed online journal from Boston College’s Lynch School of Education.  If you’re not inclined to read the studies themselves, a long but well-worth-reading discussion of the studies has just appeared in the online publication eSchool News.

In the words of eSchool, the studies identify several factors that are key to the projects’ success, including adequate planning, stakeholder buy-in, and strong school or district leadership. “Not surprisingly, the researchers say the most important factor of all is the teaching practices of instructors—suggesting school laptop programs are only as effective as the teachers who apply them.”

In a study of laptop programs in five public and private middle schools in western Massachusetts, access to 1-to-1 computing led to measurable changes in teacher practices, student engagement and achievement, and students’ research skills. Seventh graders in the second year of the program showed statistically significant gains on state test scores in English and language arts after controlling for prior achievement.

It’s “impossible to overstate the power of individual teachers in the success or failure of 1-to-1 computing,” said the study. “Teachers nearly always control how and when students access and use [the] technology during the school day. In addition, teachers must make massive investments in time and effort to adapt their teaching materials and practices to make the 1-to-1 environment effective and relevant.”

In the eSchool article, Torsten Otto, an educator from Germany said at his school, the 1-to-1 computing model is only as successful as the teachers’ 21st-century classroom practices. “In our 1-to-1 program … we put a big emphasis on project-based learning; otherwise, the laptop is no more than an expensive notepad. … Research needs to show the effects of this different style of teaching in terms of student engagement, motivation, and so-called 21st-century skills. The subject matters themselves don’t have as much room for improvement,” Otto said.

“We believe a ‘bottom-up’ approach is better than a ‘top-down,’” said Katie Morrow, technology integration specialist at O’Neill Public Schools in O’Neill, Neb.

Morrow made what I thought was the wisest observation of all: “Put the technology in kids’ hands as early as possible and let them drive the initiative forward. Students should be involved on planning committees, tech support teams, and any visioning or research teams. Publish student projects early on, bring in visitors to see the possibilities in action rather than just talk about them, use students to share at community meetings, board meetings, and in any way possible. Students will push and promote the laptop’s application in their various courses much more effectively than an administrator forcing it upon an unwilling teacher.”

Morrow said that when the benefits are apparent beyond the school building, stakeholders are willing to support education—and students realize it’s not just about the grade at the end of the unit.

“Collecting data is important, but more important is collecting stories,” she explained. “Compile anecdotal evidence and interview students. Publish projects that evolve out of the students’ opportunity to have 21st-century access 24/7—as opposed to purely test scores and teacher-driven assignments. This culture can cultivate in an initiative where the learning is the focus, rather than the instruction.”

Which is why the Recovery Act passed by Congress instructed the Federal Communication Commission to develop a strategy to bring the benefits of high-speed Internet to all Americans. Dubbed the National Broadband Plan, the FCC’s response will be made public next month.

In a speech this week to the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski gave a partial preview of what the report will contain.  The Commission’s big picture thinking is promising.

“We are at a crossroads, said Genachowski.  “For while the United States invented the Internet, when it comes to broadband we have fallen behind. One frequently cited survey ranks us 16th in the world; others rank us a few places higher. But no one can argue that we are leading the world in broadband, or are even as close as we should be. And I can tell you from speaking to my counterparts in other countries, the rest of the world is not sitting around waiting for us to catch up.”

We’ve fallen behind and need to do better. Broadband is a platform for growth.  And the broader the bandwidth, the bigger the benefits. Genachowski looked at small businesses, which have accounted for more than 22 million new American jobs over the last 15 years. “Broadband allows small business to think big and grow bigger. With a high-speed Internet connection and the emergence of cloud computing, every small business can have access to a world-class IT system and a national, indeed, global marketplace.”

The internet benefits every facet of society. It helps those out of work find new jobs.  Most job postings are now found online only, and if you don’t have Internet access, you can’t apply.  And if you don’t have broadband, you can’t take advantage of online training for the jobs that are available. The Veterans Administration created a telehealth program that has reduced hospitalizations by 19 percent. Online high school graduates are twice as likely to go to college as those who aren’t, and that college students double their learning productivity when using online systems.

The list of benefits could go on and on.

So when we talk about broadband, how much is enough? As I blogged last week, Google announced it will develop an open access Internet service to select American homes at an astonishing 1 Gbps. That’s roughly a 100-fold increase in bandwidth from the maximum speeds offered by most of the larger internet service providers today.

Genachowski is not calling for that speed yet, though he did applaud the Google initiative. The FCC plan will nevertheless be ambitious.

[The National Broadband Plan will be] a plan to ensure universal access and to turn potential access into actual broadband adoption. A plan to tear down barriers and improve access to jobs, education, and health care resources. A plan to promote private investment and competition, to lower costs and incentivize accelerated upgrades to our wired and wireless networks so that the next generation of incredible innovation happens right here at home. A plan that will be a strong complement to the Commerce and Agriculture Department’s near-term broadband grants.

To meet these challenges, the National Broadband Plan will set goals that are ambitious but achievable. It will describe a 2020 vision for U.S. broadband leadership grounded in two quintessentially American ideas — unsurpassed excellence and unrivaled opportunity…

To meet the imperatives of global competitiveness and enduring job creation, we must have broadband networks of such unsurpassed excellence that they will empower American entrepreneurs and innovators to build and expand businesses here in the United States.

Our plan will set goals for the U.S. to have the world’s largest market of very high-speed broadband users. A “100 Squared” initiative — 100 million households at 100 megabits per second — to unleash American ingenuity and ensure that businesses, large and small, are created here, move here, and stay here.

And we should stretch beyond 100 megabits. The U.S. should lead the world in ultra-high-speed broadband testbeds as fast, or faster, than anywhere in the world. In the global race to the top, this will help ensure that America has the infrastructure to host the boldest innovations that can be imagined. Google announced a one gigabit testbed initiative just a few days ago — and we need others to drive competition to invent the future.

Genachowski noted that some countries have adopted policies to make the Internet available to all citizens at a minimum of 1 to 2 megabits. “Our goal for universal service will be higher.”

Until now the federal government’s internet strategy was to largely “get out of the way” and leave the Internet’s growth to the private sector.  Genachowski is signaling that the federal government intends to be a more active partner.  Next week, the FCC will provide the results of a consumer survey it conducted on America’s attitudes toward broadband and views on how to improve access for all.  I hope the numbers show that Americans understand the importance of the Internet and the Obama administration will feel it has a strong mandate to turbo-charge the process.

We have the response from potential consumers of the service, as witnessed by the comments posted on various tech websites and mainstream media websites.  Consumers are giddy at the prospect. And doubtless many small businesses are currently dreaming up uses for such astonishing speed.  Which will be good for the economy. With increased speed will come increased Web-enabled collaboration and increased competitiveness.

The fact that there are currently no applications or services that would make full use of all that bandwidth is beside the point.  The history of technology is awash with bold statements on how much memory or bandwidth or processing power would be more than enough to last consumers for the foreseeable future.  All have proved wrong.  To paraphrase Ray Kinsella in Field of Dreams, I’m increasingly of the view that “If you build it, the needs will arise.”

Google’s intention is to build a testbed for applications and services not yet available. “We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it’s creating new bandwidth-intensive ‘killer apps’ and services, or other uses we can’t yet imagine,” said Google’s announcement. “We’ll test new ways to build fiber networks; to help inform, and support deployments elsewhere, we’ll share key lessons learned with the world.”  Good for them.

They may discover that fiber to every home in the near- and medium-term is overkill, and that setting up one Wi-Fi hotspot for every ten houses does the job just fine. But if consumers start buying the hi-def 3D television sets that will soon be on the market, one node per ten houses might not be enough.  We won’t know until we try.

“This is mainly a P.R. stunt,” Scott Cleland, chairman of Netcompetition.org an organization that represents many telecommunications companies and their industry associations told the New York Times. “With one hand Google is urging regulations that stifle broadband deployment, and with the other hand, they are saying that telecom companies should spend hundreds of billions” to give ultrafast service to all Americans, Cleland said.

P.R. stunt to them; brilliant strategic move to me.  At a relatively low cost, successful pilot projects will be a cattle prod to an industry that has been woefully slow in keeping the country’s communications infrastructure competitive with the rest of the world.  And if the current service providers can’t rise to the occasion, they should get out of the way and let others take on the challenge.

For fifteen years, we’ve been arguing that the digital revolution will challenge many fundamental aspects of the university. We have not been alone. In 1997, none other than Peter Drucker predicted that big university campuses would be “relics” within thirty years.

Universities are losing their grip on higher learning as the Internet is, inexorably, becoming the dominant infrastructure for knowledge — both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people — and as a new generation of students requires a very different model of higher education. The transformation of the university is not just a good idea; It is an imperative, and evidence is mounting that the consequences of further delay may be dire.

Read the full essay here.

6. The world needs better governments.

Some governments in Central America and Africa are just holding on and many are dysfunctional.  But governability is becoming an issue for G20 countries as well.  One leader said the US is on the brink of being “ungovernable.”  One Chinese executive responded thusly when asked to defend his country’s lack of democracy:  “So we should adopt the American system where lobbyists run everything and nothing happens?”

Democracy was still seen as an unstoppable force but in many regions of the world it is becoming stalled, and in some cases losing ground.  Basic democratic institutions are at risk and in danger of failing part due to the economic crisis in poor countries.  The best predictor of democratic survival is per capita income.  In some countries portions of the government have been captured by interest groups. Other non-democratic countries are proving competitively stable and economically healthy.  And the current economic crisis shows that national governments and domestic regulation are inadequate to deal with the challenges of the global economy.   There is also danger of protectionism and isolationism.

7. It turns out the internet DOES change everything

The much-discredited phrase from the dotcom period is not just geek speak.  The Internet and Social Networks were central to many of the discussions here.  The digital age seems to be coming of age.  I participated with CEOs of most of the important social networks in a session called The Power of Social Networks. It got a lot of buzz at Davos.  A few minutes into it the session we solicited questions from Facebook.  6,000 questions appeared in first 2 minutes.

The growing consensus is that new business models are emerging in every industry and throughout society.  I’ve argued that social networking is becoming social production and that a new mode of production is emerging – changing not only how we make software or encyclopedias but physical goods like motorcycles.

Most leaders love that a web company – Google –  is taking on China. The circumstantial evidence that the China-based hacking of Google was conducted by authorities looking for information about activists was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  Talking to Google execs I’m convinced they not going to back down.

8. Girls, women and gender. A sea change is underway.

There was lots of buzz about women’s emerging purchasing power, known as the Power of the Purse.  The expected worldwide increase of women’s income by 2013 is $5.1 trillion, which is greater than China’s expected growth of $3 trillion for the same period.

Deep interest in the so-called Girl Effect, i.e., investing in girls offers the biggest ROI in the developing world.  In African countries female illiteracy is almost a third higher than that of men.  But every year of schooling increases a girl’s future earnings by 20 percent.  And by earning more and influencing how dollars are spent, women would acquire a stronger voice in all aspects of their lives.

Although women are becoming stronger financially, they are still very weak politically.  Countries should be more aggressive in finding female candidates for public office, and look outside the regular channels. But increased financial and political power brings responsibility. Woman could be key in refocusing our political and economic efforts away from consumerism.

9.  We need new measures of progress

There is growing agreement that GDPs and GNPs are flawed tools for measuring the health of country, and we should instead emphasize the idea of Gross National Well-Being or something similar.  Just as some companies have moved to “triple-bottom line” reporting for their impact on society, many economists argue that GDPs and GNPs measure activities that are detrimental to society and ignore activities that are beneficial.

A pandemic will increase drug sales and visits to doctors, thereby driving up GNP.  Volunteer work or work in the home is not recognized as contributing to GNP.

There is no lack of research and creativity on this issue, as some governments and academics have developed a wide array of yardsticks to more accurately capture how well and healthily a country is growing.  The key now is to have these new tools recognized as legitimate and encourage their widespread adoption.

10. A new big idea.  The Global Commons.

Like a park in a village we need new global parks in the global village. Some of the global commons areas are well-recognized, such as our atmosphere, oceans and space, but there are less obvious areas that exist, or should be created, such as know-how concerning sustainability

Conventional wisdom says you should control and protect proprietary resources and innovations – especially intellectual property – through patents, copyright and trademarks. If someone infringes your IP, summon the lawyers out to do battle.  That’s often the wrong approach.  Contributing to “the commons” is not altruism; it’s the best way to build vibrant business ecosystems that harness a shared foundation of technology and knowledge to accelerate growth and innovation.

A good private sector example is when more than a dozen pharmaceutical firms abandoned their proprietary R&D projects to support open collaborations such as the SNP (single nucleotide polymorphisms) Consortium and the Alliance for Cellular Signaling.  Both projects aggregate genetic information culled from biomedical research in publicly accessible databases. They also use their shared infrastructures to harness resources and insights from the for-profit and not-for-profit research worlds. These efforts are speeding the industry toward fundamental breakthroughs in molecular biology – breakthroughs that promise an era of personalized medicine and treatments for intractable disorders. Nobody gives up their potential patent rights over new end products, and by sharing some basic intellectual property the companies bring products to market more quickly.

One overarching theme at the conference is the confidence that young people have such great potential. Obviously we have a lot of work ahead of us if we don’t want to pass on a deeply damaged planet to our children.  At the final session at Davos, we heard from six inspiring young people on stage on their hopes and ambitions.  There were more than a few tears in the audience.

1. The state of the world is not good.

The theme of Davos was Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild, which may sound a bit grandiose to some people.  I doubt many attendees think this now.  The world clearly needs fixing.

Figures cited at the Forum show we’re a long way from being out of the woods on the global recession. Jobs are and will continue to be a huge issue.  It is estimated the unemployment in the word jumped by 50 million during the recession, and the working poor increased by 200 million.

But the financial meltdown and recession are arguably symptoms of a bigger systemic crises and deep institutional failures. There is growing recognition that many of the organizations and institutions that have served us well for decades, even centuries, are no longer able.  Many of the pillars of economic and social life have come to the end of their life cycle.  In 2009, the American auto industry — the epitome of the industrial economy — collapsed.  The upheaval is now spreading to other sectors — from the universities and science, to entertainment and media, to government and democracy.  The continuing collapse of many newspapers in the United States is a storm warning.

Many other serious problems loom.  Lack of access to fresh water is a catastrophe for humanity, as 2.8 billion (or 44%) of the world’s population already live in high water stress areas, increasing to 3.9 billion by 2030. In a world of growing capacity, global poverty is getting worse. Ten children die of hunger every minute and a third of the world’s population fester in slums. Almost everyone, especially the scientists at Davos is deeply troubled by climate change.  We need to reinvent out energy grids, transportation systems and reindustrialize the planet. And we’re running out of time.

As Bill Clinton said to a few of us at a cocktail party, “The world is too unequal, unstable, and unsustainable.”

2. Everywhere there are new collaborative models emerging to solve global problems

Our systems of global cooperation are not rising to the many challenges we face.   The global warming conference in Copenhagen has become a metaphor for failure.

I believe the Forum itself is an example of the global multi-stakeholder cooperation that is picking up where nation states and formal institutions left off.

The global humanitarian response to the Haitian earthquake is showing us what is possible.  The 7.0 magnitude earthquake not being just a Caribbean island crisis, but a world crisis.  Millions of people and thousands of institutions have responded in non-traditional ways.  They are donating their time, money, goods and services. Charitable organizations such as the Red Cross received donation of tens of millions of dollars within days by using new technologies such as texting, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.  Social media has become the pre-eminent tool to connect people around the world, and help empower people become active participants in relief efforts.

There are 100 million people on Facebook Causes – the biggest application on Facebook.  These are not just people talking to each other.  They are now organizing activities in the physical world. I heard of dozens of examples at Davos.

3. There is a profound rethinking of the financial services industry and its role in society.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy put it well:  “The banker’s job is not to speculate, it is to analyse credit risk, assess the capacity of borrowers to repay their loans and finance growth of the economy. If financial capitalism went so wrong, it was, first and foremost, because many banks were no longer doing their job. Why take the risk of lending to entrepreneurs when it is so easy to earn money by speculating on the markets? Why lend only to those who can repay the loan when it is so easy to shift the risks off the balance sheet?”

The mood at Davos was widespread: Banks need to be reined in, the sooner the better.  US banking executives used to be the stars of Davos.  Now they are a low-key, humble and dour looking group. Last year at Davos everyone was in a degree of shock.  This year, a better term would be “fed up.” Fed up with banks that are “too big to fail,” with government bailouts, with the human costs of this crisis and with an industry that basically got out of control. For some CEOs the crisis warrants a critical re-evaluation of market capitalism.

4.  Executive pay, especially for bankers, needs fixing.

There was a very strong sentiment that the issue of exorbitant executive compensation needs to be corrected.  The biggest targets of discussions were bankers and other architects of the financial crisis.  Many heavily damaged their own firms, some to the point of bankruptcy, paralyzed the commercial credit market for tens of thousands of companies, and today are not able or willing to loan money to entrepreneurs.  To set aside $billions for bonuses just after they had been bailed out by the government was viewed by almost everyone as unconscionable. Even those banks that didn’t need a bailout cannot justify 8 digit compensation packages.

5.  Sustainability is an idea whose time has come.  Business is moving from talk to action.

As one executive put it: “It’s no longer about the Green Economy; it’s about the Economy.”  Sustainability is the central issue many businesses face.

A few short years ago, sustainability was buried in a company’s PR department and it was primarily a matter of spin.  But then governments began forcing certain reporting and behaviors, and the corporate issue became compliance.  Then sustainability became a matter of competitiveness and cost reduction, by capturing efficiencies such as reducing waste and energy use.  CEOs everywhere at Davos said we’ve now arrived at the point where sustainability must be integrated into the business strategy — what is a business, and how it does it operate and relate to the rest of the world.

We’ll see if they walk the talk.

I’ll post themes 6 – 10 tomorrow.

With the conspicuous exception of global warming, Harper acknowledged that many challenges face the world, but told delegates that the two most appropriate arenas for discussion and decision making are the G8 and the G20.  He described the latter as “the world’s premier forum for economic cooperation.” And each country should be guided by “enlightened self-interest” and a better “attitude.”

But the mood in Davos is that the planet is facing urgent, complicated, 21^st century problems, and we need to craft 21^st century systems to develop the answers. We should involve all of our planet’s best talent in the solution-seeking process, including the private sector, civil society and individual citizens.

Doubtless Harper placed emphasis on the G8 and G20 because this year’s meetings will occur in Canada and he is the Chair. But that doesn’t mean he should be indifferent to the enormous contributions that could be made by others, or closed to the exciting new approaches to solving global problems.

Following last year’s World Economic Forum at Davos, many delegates went on to participate in the Forum’s Global Redesign Initiative in meetings around the world. The Initiative brought together diverse stakeholders to develop fresh solutions to the many challenges facing our small and fragile planet.  Much of this year’s Forum was devoted to discussing the proposals developed by the Initiative.

The Initiative itself was driven by the belief of Forum members that our international collaborative processes are tired and too constrained to meet current needs.  In Davos, the failed Copenhagen global-warming conference was frequently cited by delegates as a metaphor for the inadequacy of existing processes. To be sure, no one is suggesting that nation states do not need to sit down and hammer out accords. But many Davos delegates believe that such meetings, while necessary, are by themselves insufficient to grapple with the thorny issues confronting us.

Davos delegates feel all issues on the global agenda should be addressed in a systemic, integrated and strategic way, and are frustrated many government leaders aren’t embracing this view.

Had Harper come a day earlier, he would have heard French President Nicolas Sarkozy deliver a withering critique of how the planet’s issues are managed today. “From the moment we accepted the idea that the market was always right and that no other opposing factors need be taken into account, globalization skidded out of control,” Sarkozy said. Many systems in the world, including capitalism, were in serious need of reform.  “Each of us must hold the conviction that the world of tomorrow cannot be the same as the world of yesterday.”  A text of Sarkozy’s remarks can be seen here.

While Harper promotes the notion of enlightened self-interest, that got us nowhere in Copenhagen. And the irony of Harper’s remarks is that many here think one country with needing a better “attitude” on climate change is Canada. And it is an uphill battle for Canada to turn around its reputation as “the dirty old man of the climate world.”

In fact Harper further damaged Canada’s reputation on this issue, and undermined his approach to global cooperation in a panel discussion after his speech. When questioned about Canada’s position he said that countries needed to take into account the economic costs of being green.  To be sure Canada, as an energy producer has more complex issues than European countries. But some in the audience were disturbed by the remark.

Liberal MP Scott Brison said to me that Prime Minister Harper was “the only leader at Davos who didn’t understand the opportunities for economic growth and jobs in becoming a green nation. Environmental laggards will become economic laggards in the emerging global carbon-constrained green economy.”

Yes the G8 and G20 meetings will be important and they may even make some progress on climate change.  But today there are collaborations involving millions of people, along with governments, private companies and civil society organizations that are actually doing something about climate change. Government leaders need to listen to fresh thinking about how to harness this power, rather than relying on old approaches that have the world stalled.